As human beings, each individual has a different perspective or stance at attaining life. Our attitudes and our mindsets are shaped around our surroundings, and the attitude we choose to follow in life remains difficult at times due to those surroundings. Even though our personality...
The Victorian novel often focuses on prominent, relevant issues of the time during which it is written. These issues can range from class, ambition, and gender to love, sexuality, and desire. Authors of the Victorian era delivered insight on these often controversial topics through the...
Introduction The poems under study are “Neutral Tones” (“NT”) and “I Look Into My Glass” (“Glass”). Both poems focus on loss of a different kind: “Glass” expresses the loss of Hardy’s youth, while “NT” focuses on the death of Hardy’s estranged wife and grieves the...
Introduction If one word could come close to characterizing the entirety of the Victorian Era that would most certainly be change. In all aspects and domains, from industrialization to scientific discoveries, the period stands for development and rebirth. But greatness cannot be achieved completely and...
The question of fate is one that has been posed by human beings throughout the ages. Are our lives determined by that which is “bound” to happen, or is it simply by random chance? Thomas Hardy addresses this question in his poem “Hap,” which expresses...
“At an Inn” is a poem written by Thomas Hardy, a composition showcasing Hardy’s longing for another woman who is not his wife, Florence. In this work, Hardy focuses on the misinterpretations of the nature of the two’s relationship from strangers at an inn. He...
In Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy uses nature to influence the actions of his shepherd and shepherdess protagonists, Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, in two separate episodes involving rain storms. The conflict of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd centers upon Bathsheba Everdene’s...
Constituting one of the dominant symbols in Thomas Hardy’s classic work Tess of the D’Urbervilles are the continually reappearing birds. The birds symbolize varying degrees of freedom, foreshadowing the events of Tess’s life and frequently paralleling them as well. Tess encounters birds in the wild,...
Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” describes the events leading up to the sinking of the Titanic as well as the aftermath; however, on a deeper level, the work explores the theme of the conflict between man and nature. These opposing forces demonstrate the...
A key theme in both Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations[1] and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles[2] is cruelty. Both authors treat this cruelty in such a way as to expose the flaws of a society in which the powerful, either in terms of class, physical...
The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, begins with personification of a majestic heath, the setting for this novel: “The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could… retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning...
In his novel The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy creates an unreliable world of misconceptions and coincidences by paralleling the setting of Egdon Heath to reality, as perceived through human nature, to convey his theme. Throughout the novel, the characters struggle with the obscurity...
In her book Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, Carolyn Heilbrum defines androgyny as “a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned (Heilbrum 10). In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sue is...
Thomas Hardy once said, “A Plot, or Tragedy, should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions, by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events produced by the said...
In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, the main character Clym Yeobright seems to disappoint everyone he loves upon his arrival home to Egdon Heath from Paris. His refusal to continue to lead the life he had previously been living in Paris is most...
In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the reader is introduced to a character named Tess who comes to be known as a “Child of Nature” (Amazon.co.uk). The British author’s novel flourishes with the use of natural imagery. Hardy uses natural imagery to mimic...
The breakdown of a relationship is presented in many ways throughout both ‘Neutral Tones’ by Thomas Hardy and ‘Modern Love’ by George Meredith. For example, they both explore themes of memory, and loss (of love). I will be exploring and comparing both poems to each...
The short story, “The Withered Arm” explores the role of women in society, their submission to men as well as their independence while at all times retaining an understanding of their struggles. The author, Thomas Hardy reflects on the view of women in the late...
Some of the most readable and critically acclaimed social commentaries in the English language, such as Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, employ a fascinating protagonist and numerous sarcastic intrusions. Thomas Hardy similarly produces a beautiful novel in Tess...
When wilt thou awake, O Mother, wake and see Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences + experts online Get my essay As one who, held in trance, has laboured long By vacant rote...
Psalm 142, verse 2: “No man cared…” This Biblical verse applies perfectly to “In Tenbris”, a poem written out of despair for the society Hardy in which lived. He expresses his pity and contempt for the materialist citizens and power hungry rulers. Made-to-order essay as...
Hardy and His Guilt Over Emma: Nature as a Constant Amidst Human Grief Thomas Hardy’s poem “At Castle Boterel” shares a thematic approach with “Under the Waterfall,” as both works explore the stark contrast between a joyful past and a bleak, empty present. This contrast...
Indubitably, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ is largely reminiscent of the archetypal Grecian tragedy; evoking an overwhelming sense of pity/catharsis for the female protagonist. However, the constituents of said ‘tragedy’; though in essence prevalent throughout, are discordant throughout the majority of Hardy’s novel. It...
Any literary critic or scholar who sets out to verify the relationship between the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and the English novelist/poet Thomas Hardy cannot realistically begin without considering the questions posed by Cyril Clemens in the autumn of 1925 during an interview with...
John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” though written nearly a century apart, share many poetic elements that allow readers to effectively draw a surface parallel between the two poems. Though both of these poems have analogous stylistic elements, a...
Tom Hardy knew he always had the talent inside of him and would go to extra miles to achieve his dreams of becoming an actor. Hardy had his big break in 2001 with the movie Band of Brothers and has remained on top since then....
In Thomas Hardy’s tendentious Victorian novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy uses a format akin to that of a tragic hero to critique the double standards of Victorian society. His heroine, Tess, challenges Victorian standards by maintaining her innate purity and refusing to be defined...
Intrigue, murder, and suicide — by all accounts, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure was a complete and terrible shock to the religiously conservative readers of the late nineteenth century, and this is exactly what he intended. These were, after all, the very people he was...
Thomas Hardy wrote “The Shadow on the Stone” after his wife’s death, and the ghost he mentions is his wife’s. The poem focuses on the realities of time and death. The poet’s feelings are complex, which is reflected in the complex rhyme scheme of the...
Introduction Domicilium is a poem portraying Hardy’s idealistic view of nature through his description of his childhood home and the surrounding landscape. The poem is split into two parts separated by a time shift; the first section is on the current state of the cottage...
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England.
Works
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure
Themes
Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness. Fate or chance is another important theme.
Legacy
Hardy's legacy connects the masterful British writers like Wordsworth and Eliot to the era of Modernism that culminated in the likes of Woolf and that other, more poetic Eliot. Hardy’s most significant work spans some five decades, comprising novels and poetry that today are regarded as classics of the canon.
Quotes
“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
“A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
